Oculus CEO hopes Rift spurs gamers to upgrade their ‘crappy PCs’

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The CEO of Oculus, Palmer Lucky, did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) yesterday, where he touched on several interesting topics — including some much-needed clarification on how the Oculus Store will function, and the future of the PC gaming market.

According to Palmer, when Oculus talks about lining up exclusives, it’s talking about the Oculus Store, not the Oculus Rift. Games developers aren’t required to sign exclusivity contracts to publish in the Oculus Store, though Oculus will only sell its own titles through that venue. Lucky states that while game developers aren’t required to only publish through Oculus, “the vast majority [of VR developers] are probably going to end up on our store.”

The only headsets that are compatible with the Oculus Store, right now, are GearVR and the Oculus Rift itself. Other companies, like Valve, could choose to allow Oculus to support them, but Palmer doesn’t seem to think this is going to happen in the near-term.

This could present an obstacle to widespread VR development, particularly if the companies involved don’t find a way to cooperate with each other. Oculus is clearly trying to establish itself as the go-to destination for purchasing VR content.

At one point, Palmer notes that, “There are several games we have funded that also integrate SteamVR support… We do require Oculus SDK integration for everything in our store, funded or not. We can’t rely on a (currently) lower-performance SDK that is controlled by a competitor, especially when they have shown that Oculus support is not a high priority — SteamVR support for DK2 is frequently broken, they are focusing on HTC’s Vive, which makes sense.”

It’s hard to show people what VR looks like from inside VR itself.

In theory, developers can choose to support multiple headsets, but I’m dubious of whether they’ll actually do so. Remember, VR technology has some steep requirements around minimum refresh rates and smooth frame delivery that you just don’t run into on a conventional monitor. Companies that want to port existing games over to VR will face an uphill battle to meet these requirements without compromising the title. Now, add the difficulty of supporting multiple SDKs and hardware configurations on top of that. Bad VR doesn’t just create unhappy customers, it makes your customers vomit.

I’ll be surprised if multi-headset support becomes the rule, rather than a rare exception, at least at first. In the long run, companies may agree on a common set of standards and quality targets that are universal across all headsets, but that’s not going to be the case right out of the gate.

Will Oculus drive PC upgrades?

User Manoko asked Palmer what his options for VR tech look like, given that his system hardware is “a crappy computer.” Palmer’s response is rather interesting:

“Your crappy PC is the biggest barrier to adoption, which is why we are working with all the major hardware vendors to optimize for VR — if ‘normal’ PCs get good enough to run VR, then the majority of people will be able to buy a relatively cheap headset and just use whatever computer they already own to drive it.”

At the same time, however, Palmer clearly expects Oculus to boost PC sales, noting:

“We have been working with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel since basically the start of Oculus — they know that virtual reality is going to demand better and better hardware, and drive demand for powerful GPUs and CPUs beyond the existing gaming and enterprise market. That extends to PC manufacturers using their components, obviously.

“Most people have not had a reason to own a high-end PC for a long time. VR will change that, much like video-related stuff drove high end CPU adoption.”

In the short term, therefore, Lucky thinks that enthusiast demand for components will increase as VR becomes more popular. In the longer term, however, the goal is to bring those improvements and capabilities down to a larger market. As ExtremeTech’s hardware reviewer and a gaming enthusiast for nearly my entire life, I’m not sure which way this situation will break.

First, the positive: It’s absolutely possible for hardware advances to drive game developers to create new, immersive types of games. The advent of more powerful consumer CPUs made games like Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake possible. 3D graphics turbo-charged Quake, Quake 2, and every title that followed.

In many other cases, however, the industry has moved more slowly. Multi-core adoption in gaming moved at a snail’s pace past the dual-core mark. Quad cores were available and useful from 2005 forwards, but it took time for the benefits of that purchase to move from the high-end workstation to common consumer software.

In the case of VR, I suspect it’s going to be very difficult to push the technology into low-end PCs. High Bandwidth Memory should give AMD unprecedented APU bandwidth by 2017-2018, but VR targets a constant 90 FPS frame rate — and that’s a very high bar for any kind of mobile chip. There are certain technologies, like foveated rendering, that could theoretically make it easier for low-end graphics cards to deliver high-quality VR experiences by only rendering the area the eye is looking in high detail — but that takes better head tracking than we currently have.

I think Lucky is right when he talks about VR driving enthusiasts to upgrade. I’m much less certain that the technology will prove central enough to drive the entire computer industry towards the myriad technologies that will make VR available on lower-end hardware. But then, as the head of the highest-profile VR company, it’s his job to cast a rosy future for the tech.

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